premium WordPress photography themes

Introducing the Stock Photography theme for WordPress

For years there’s been only one way to sell stock photography: Do business with a large, corporate stock photography company. Photographers had no choice but to be at the mercy of a company’s shifting rules and regulations.

We knew there had to be a better way. So, we set out to build an alternative to the traditional “top-down” stock photography business. We made changes that will have radical results. Brace yourself.

Run It Like A Boss

Finally you call the shots. Our new WordPress theme, Stock Photography, turns your web site into a stock photography business. Manage your portfolio, blog and stock photography business all from one site. This streamlined approach will save you tons of time; spend it vacationing on an exotic island like the boss that you are.

Say My Name

For years you’ve been an anonymous cog helping stock photo corporations get bigger and bigger. That ends today. Now, you own the business and the brand. Design it and name it what you want. Build yourself some much-deserved recognition. People will be buying your images and shouting your name from the rooftops in no time.

Be Internet Famous

When you run an online business, Google decides who’s famous and who isn’t. Stick with corporate photography companies and your name and images might end up on page six or page ten. Use our Stock Photography theme, and have the semantic power of WordPress behind you. Our goal is to get you to page one.

Represent Your Niche

These days web sites for every interest imaginable exist; yet stock photography sites have lagged far behind. Today they catch up. With our new WordPress theme, you can create a site for a specific type of stock photography. For example, you might consider building a location-specific stock photography website, such as “Washington D.C. stock photography.” Or perhaps you prefer a topic-specific site and decide to target the niche for “surfing stock photography”. You’re images won’t be lumped together with thousands of unrelated images like on other stock sites, and your web site will rise higher in search engine rankings for your target market.

Get Paid

Stop doing business with other companies that control image pricing and charge you 20-70% commission on every stock photo you sell. Set your own prices with the Stock Photography theme, and keep 100% of the sales. More money, it’s not really a problem after all.

Compare

Stock Photography theme

Corporate Stock Companies

You keep 100% sales

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No monthly service fees

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Integrated with your portfolio & blog

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You’re the boss

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Target niche markets

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Ability to customize all aspects of the design

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Advanced Features

We put a ton of research and development time into the Stock Photography theme and packed the theme full of killer features, including:

Advanced Search – Find images based on keywords, price, collections, licensing terms or the orientation of the image.

Lightbox – Save images to a lightbox and share with friends, family or clients.

Thad is the founder of Theme.Works and Graph Paper Press. Previously, he produced online multimedia and documentary projects for USA Today including the inauguration of President Barack Obama and many others. He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife Abby.

248 thoughts on “Introducing the Stock Photography theme for WordPress”

The Stock Photography theme designed to cater to selling photos. The Sell Media plugin allows you to sell type of media you upload into WordPress. You should (we haven’t tested it for videos) be able to use Stock Photography to sell video files, but, they would need to be uploaded via WordPress (not Vimeo Pro). Sell Media doesn’t convert/resize/recompress video files at all though.

Do you mean manually bill clients? If they don’t want to purchase directly from your site (using Paypal) you could have them email you and then you could invoice them. Paypal is the only gateway currently but we have plans on adding more. What Gateway are you interested in?

That is excatly my need. I dont need to push customer to pay for printed photos immediatelly. Also, I can

see that as a state in checkout form, there are only US states, am I right? But this should be easily to change.

In my case, easiest way is the best – in checkout can customer just write his contact address and phone, after he send order, I will receive email and I will contact them directly. I know that this is not preferable (or even possible) for bigt stock companies, but I like personal touch with customer.

This is my question…I set up collections and I see it can have a parent, but I don;t see any thumbnails from the child collection appear on the page. The instructions don’t mention how to set that up at all…

Looks great! Are the images protected in any way (watermark, right click disable, etc)? I’ve noticed on the demo, the images are easily downloadable. (Yes, I know it is possible to get around most all these – but a barrier helps).

Totally agree. VERY aggravating when ppl disable right click. Sometimes I merely want to open a link in a new window and cannot. Free tools/extensions in Chrome to capture the whole screen or part of it. Plus commercial products. AND VIRAL MARKETING is GREAT! Be sure to watermark your photos and PRAY ppl spread them all over the net. Invaluable!! Ppl find my work like crazy! Which is why I need an effective ecommerce site. I’ve created MANY online stores and hate them all. Seriously, it’s 2013. Think forward. 😉

THAD I FREAKIN’ LOVE YOU! I’m launching a fund-raiser for my Clash photo/story book. BUT after that … I am sooo looking forward to FINALLY using YOUR theme in a way I want! YOU are making so many of us happy.

May 24th, Rent day. Working around the clock to raise the funds .. now this! Well, who needs to eat. Wait … I’m down to one cup of brown rice, banana, and romaine lettuce per day. I’ll just live on air!

Thad, what about shipping? I have a flat rate for USA, but international shipping is killing me. I need different rates. My current WP ecommerce plugin is supposed to offer various rates, but does not. That’s a big issue for me. I can follow up, but ya, know, writing ppl to get more money takes time. Better they know upfront the shipping charges. Not a deal breaker, but just wondering. thanks!

Thad, no built-in Pinterest link? It’s FAB for photographers. ALSO PRICING. IF I’m uploading tons of images w/same media output, pricing options, do I create a price list to assign that category or group or what? I think I asked you about uploading/downloading CSV with products, prices, options, weight, KEYWORDS, metadata, etc. You said that wasn’t planned. 🙁

WILL it import metadata from Lightroom?

HOW to efficiently input that info? THAT is such a time killer. Keywords and options. Successfully marketing and selling photos online is monster eating our time. ANY effective use of technology re the repetitive tasks is sooo appreciated. Thanks Thad!

FINALLY, have you a page of FAQs so we don’t have to keep re-reading all this on several pages. Save you time answering again and again. SOME info on the plugin pages, some here.

Compiling these questions would save ALL of us time. AND you can get back to development, right? Thanks 😉

Final questions for today: quickly looking at demo, can we turn off info like camera data (stock photo details)? NO ONE’s biz what camera or lens I used. I assume that’s part of the widget area. I use right side for recent posts, and all kinds of stuff, but NEVER camera info. TMI.

Home page: collections indicate text on bottom left overlay on image. When I go to that collection, no overlay text. Must have either text overly OR caption underneath EVERY PHOTO ON EVERY PAGE.

Ppl are lazy, sorry, but they need info right now. IF they have to mouse-over or click, they are gone. Which punk group I shot and when. Captions either UNDER the image or overlay on top.

Blog: we can have sidebars via widgets? Esp gallery posts. I HATE full screen images. Right sidebar for navigation. That’s a killer for me for many themes.

Ppl NEED navigation. I get emails, ppl get lost without that. MAYBE your clients more sophisticated and patient, but oh my. Photo editors and collectors (esp low end) in a rush … gimme all that info now or I’m gone … yes, that’s what I deal with. THANKS!

2. Text under images – On the homepage and collection page template, the text overlays the image so visitors know which collection they’re visiting. Individual image appearing on a specific collection page the title shows up in an overlay on hover. We wanted to build a clean theme without visual clutter.

3. Blog sidebar – Yes, we just don’t have them active on the demo site.

Very nice, well thought out theme guys! My concern relates to SEO though. Without spiderable text associated with each thumb (i.e. thumbnail title and description) and text on the page the search engines won’t have much context for the page. Are the overlays completely indexable and can any text be added to the collections pages?

the lack of in-built tax support is an issue because if you have other tools on the same site or other sites that use papal AND the scripts/tools etc support taxes, when you enable tax in paypal, customers using the other site will get charged tax twice. So you’ll likely need 2 separate papal accounts in this case.

1. .ico not working
2. unable to delete headers in header tab
3. Disappointed extensions are separate – would like to switch to annual plan – cheaper than buying site and extensions – kinda a bait and switch – should be more explicit in the description of site
4. Documentation is EXTREMELY light to non existent – yet to see how it works with paypal – yet to see an example of that feature working…
5. http://photosrq.com

0. Thanks!
1. Checking that now. Will fix if it’s a bug
2. Headers are part of core WordPress. Are you sure you can’t delete it?
3. I agree. We’ll make that clearer. The demo site does show all plugins that are included in the theme download.
4. The theme instructions contain text, screenshots and video tutorials. Let us know what needs clarifying and we’ll make it happen.

Impressive theme guys! I am also wondering if the background image on the home page can be set to rotate with each page reload? I have been looking at themes with rotating image galleries on the homepage and really wanted that, but a header that can be set to change on page reload might suffice. Is that easily doable with this theme, or is it just fixed?

I also just ran a test with Google PageSpeed extension in chrome and the home page only got a score of 67…it appears that the images are being scaled via HTML or CSS and not not serving up resized images. That slows the page load time dramatically. Doesn’t wordpress automatically resize thumbs from larger images so that a smaller image file is served up?

Isn’t there a way to resize images to a smaller size using a graphics engine like ImageMagick or GD? I just installed another template that is reposnsive and uses GD. I was able to install image magick as a plugin to optimize the images too.

Hi, this theme seems a HUGE step ahead for photographers. Just two questions: what extensions are included with the theme? Any of them? Or should I buy them aside?
If I get the annual membership, would all Stock Photo Theme and ALL the extensions be included?
Thanks and congratulatons for the theme.

I have the Anual Subscription and all the free plugins are off course free (including sell media)
But sell Media Extensions (the ones that you are referring to) are still a payable add-on.
– in my post above I already mentioned the limited functionality of the themes, and you still have to pay to increase it.

This theme includes two FREE extensions: Advanced Search and Magnifier. The demo site for Stock Photography accurately reflects all the features/plugins/extensions that are included in the purchase of the theme. All other extensions for Sell Media (all of which work great with Stock Photography) can be purchased separately here:

Hi, this theme seems a HUGE step ahead for photographers. Just two questions: what extensions are included with the theme? Any of them? Or should I buy them aside?
If I get the annual membership, would all Stock Photo Theme and ALL the extensions be included?
Thanks and congratulatons for the theme.

1. I’ve seen you see the pictures as a continuous gallery in the blog, but it seems that you can only see the pictures one by one in the “Collections” section. Is it possible to see them as a continuous gallery?

2. I only see horizontal or square pictures. Have you tried vertical pictures in a gallery or a collection? Do you have any example to see how do they look like?

I think what she is asking is can you resize the thumbnails to suit the image aspect ratio, not always cropped to square. I have a lot of a panoramics, and cropping every thumbnail to square doesn’t really work.

Hi, right now I have a Sidewinder Theme for my web site http://www.albertomateo.com (pictures are BIG, they’re shown FAST and the EXPERIENCE to watch them is CONTINUOUS and ELEGANT, with acceleration effects) and Modslider for my blog http://www.thelastfootprint.com (the blog of Sidewinder Theme is too simple). With Stock Photo Theme you have to scroll down to the thumbnails to see the next/previous picture, the experience is broken into different steps. That may be good for selling the images (something that has to be done one step at a time), but for showing your work something like a gallery with buttons (as you have set up in the blog, or in the style of Sidewinder) would be great.
Thanks, Alberto.

Hi, This theme looks great for lets say up to 100 images.
after that it becomes to bulky.. You speak of options, so here is something I would Personally like to see: options.

1 column, 2 column, 3 column, 4 column, 5 column, 6 column Layouts. (possibly with sidebars)
Is it possible to change the final preview size, while having it stylised – right now it is 2/3 is it possible to have it 2/2 or 1/3 ?
I agree with having a slider on top, there are some AMAZING sliders on the market (for which you can get a developers licence)
More than one Blog Layout
If you feel like it, and would like to help us poor theme users – Stylise some pages for us, make pre – styled pages like: FAQ, Contact (with/without maps), Licence page, Pass Protected, etc)
Also would be great to see the stylised shortcodes that come with the theme.

I could go on, but the point is: LESS is NOT more – Minimal Design should NOT mean Minimal Functionality.
P.S. It would be nice if the Sell Media extensions would be included in the annual subscription.

Can you be more specific regarding the theme becoming “bulky” with more than 100 images? We have thousands of images in our testing sites and everything works as expected.

Our development philosophy includes this edict: “Make decisions, not options”. More options forces users to make more decisions. More decisions leads to more confusion. More confusion leads to bad user experience. Please see the “Decision not options” section here for more explanation: http://wordpress.org/about/philosophy/

Eventually, you’ll want to learn a little CSS code to make those small changes (columns, page styling) and not rely on options.

1) Does the theme allow for licensing terms/agreement to be part of the purchasing process? ie. something like… show the terms/license with a “By clicking here, you understand and agree to the terms of this agreement” prior to the customer licensing the image.

I fully endorse the idea that the client checks an “Agreement to terms” checkbox. In fact I’d ask for a multilingual one. I’m Spaniard and half of my clients speak Spanish and the other half speak other languages (and I communicate with them in English). The optimum would be if the browser saw the language of the client. If he was Spanish the text in Spanish would show; if he was from other country the text in English would show. Hope this idea is useful.

1) I would like to offer a mix of free and purchase images with this theme. What would be the best route for doing something like this? Just create a collection labeled “free” and set the purchase price to $0? Will the checkout allow for $0? Or is there an easier way so that free images can simply be downloaded by clicking a button?

2) I understand that Paypal is able to calculate tax for a transaction, but can someone inform me on a good way to keep track of all tax $ collected and owed to the IRS at the end of a year? For instance if I sell X amount of photos, do I need to manually keep track of all the state tax collected or is there an easier way? Thanks

IRS does not collect sales tax, each state does. You need to be registered as a vendor to collect and remit sales tax to your state’s taxing authority. Sales taxes are due quarterly to the state. I file in three states and they all have online reporting and payment. Until you register you are not legally allowed to conduct business in the state. You would do well to consult with an accountant on how to add up your taxable sales…it’s not really hard, but confusing the first time.

Our Stock Photography theme doesn’t integrate with PhotoShelter. We decided to build an all-in-one solution because it just made sense for our users. Everything lives in one place (Blog, E-Commerce, Portfolio) with our Stock Photography theme.

Just wondering what data fields the search box is pulling from for this template? I tried searching for image titles like “thoughtful man” and also for description text and I didn’t get any successful searches. If you don;t want to use the built in search engine can third party plugins be tied in to the template’s search box, or would that require significant coding effort? Thanks!

One other (minor) question…I see you have added social media share buttons on each image page, which is great…can they be extended beyond Facebook and twitter…ie. to add pinterest, google+, and whatever other social media you want. Also, FB Like button, Google +1, etc. Thanks!

Sure, but you’ll need to find a plugin for that. We’ve limited it to Facebook and Twitter for now. We have to cut it off at some point. Everyone wants more and more and more and more social options. We’ve decided to support only the most popular and proven social platforms.

HI, I agree that Facebook and Twitter are the most popular social networks for the general public, but if you’re building a Theme FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS, Pinterest should also be, in my honest opinion, an option. Thanks, Alberto.

A “Pin It” button as a standard feature would be great in my opinion. An speaking in a broad sense: anything related to SHARING the content in Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and e-mail (like those pluings like dig dig but integrated in the design) would be awsome. Thanks.

I purchased this today and started to customize it…I decided to create a child theme before continuing too far. Even though the child theme is set up correctly somehow it won’t import the style.css from the parent theme using @import url(“../stock-photography/style.css”);. I’ve checked everything…setting up a child theme doesn’t seem to work for this theme.

I purchased this today and started to customize it…I decided to create a child theme before continuing too far. Even though the child theme is set up correctly somehow it won’t import the style.css from the parent theme using @import url(“../stock-photography/style.css”);. I’ve checked everything…setting up a child theme doesn’t seem to work for this theme.

Great theme–something I’ve been looking for for a while. A question about the collections. Can there be “sub” collections? For instance, if I had my collections as, “Wildlife,” and “Landscapes,” could have further divide them? So, could I further divide “Wildlife” into, “Mammals,” and “Birds?”

Hi Graph-Paper-Press Team, i am intrested in buying the Stock Photography Template. Is there a way to choose an other payment method like advance payment? And my second question, will the customer get an order number, when he bought a picture and get a bill?

Dear Graph-Paper Press Team,
Is it possible to offer images without payment through the site? For example I will offer rights managed images, the customer has to ask me for the price and will pay afterwards, but not over internet. Can I fade out or hide the pricing boxes and for example the word buy in the thumbnails? So using the shop system without shopping.

Oh, I see what you’re after. This could be done. You would just need to remove the BUY button from your theme files. You could also just change the link on the BUY button to link to contact page, if you prefer.

Hello there.
Is it a issue of settings that in the Template Demo the price is not shown at the picture and will shown first when i press Purchase button. Can the price be shown under the Purchase button too?

It sounds like you’re interested in customizing the theme. You’ll need to know code in order to customize your theme. You can either do it yourself (if you know code) or hire a customizer to help: http://graphpaperpress.com/customization/

1. Yes, but you’ll need to customize your theme. You’ll need to know code in order to customize your theme. You can either do it yourself (if you know code) or hire a customizer to help: http://graphpaperpress.com/customization/
2. I’m not sure I understand. “When you click” insinuates that you’re interested in some kind of additional functionality after click. Perhaps you mean something entirely different though. Please let me know.
3. Yes, the default page template can be used for this.
4. Yes, just remove widgets from the Sidebar Widget location.

Really enjoying seeing my new site take shape. But one important question. Is it just me, or are the thumbnails quite ‘soft’ ? I appreciate they have to be compressed for internet viewing and fast loading. But my thumbs are far from sharp. And on a photography site, that’s not a great outcome. (I’m not sure whether this query should be directed to graphpaperpress or wordpress?)

I’m having this same issue, especially with the header image which is extremely soft. I don’t think this is a wordpress issue. I have another blog with some of the same images that I’m using on the Stock Photography test blog, that are sharp.

The very first version of Stock Photography (version 1.0.0) had header images cropped to 1000 pixels wide. We increased that to 1600 in version 1.0.0. Upgrading to the latest version should help. You can upgrade in one click by installing the GPP Theme Updates plugin: http://graphpaperpress.com/plugins/gpp-theme-updates/

You don’t need BuddyPress for this functionality. The theme and plugin support multi-user contributors out of the box. Each author on your WordPress blog can contribute photos. If you want to pay them commissions based on each sale, you’ll want the Sell Media Commissions extension:http://graphpaperpress.com/?download=commissions

Is one able to setup a “gate keeper” such as requiring a guest to login with their email (to send out notifications as to when the gallery is now available or expiring or on sale) in this theme? If so, you have just effectively made all online image hosting services obsolete.

This theme and the Sell Media plugin now support “Password Protected Collections”. You can email your customers who can opt into your mailing list as often as you like. You’ll need the MailChimp extension for this mailing list integration:http://graphpaperpress.com/?download=mailchimp

Thad,
1) on a sale, does Sell Media email a link to a buyer (with the properly sized image for them to download), or does it notify me of the sale and then I have to email it to them, or how does this work?
2) based on A to #1, if it does it automatically, I assume it “resizes then removes watermark”?
3) if I have 3 sizes for sale (i.e. 600×400, 1200×800, 2400×1800) do I upload “just” a 2400×1800 and it resizes, or do I have to upload all 3 sizes?

Thanks, about ready to start building then will grab one of your new themes! Regards. Mark

1. It emails the buyer automatically after payment is made.
2. Yes, it emails them the non-watermarked version.
3. You just upload the original file and it resizes them automatically based on the sizes you set in the settings.

2) What happens if I upload a low-res file and someone wants to buy an high-res file? Some situations require getting batch-processed low-res files online quickly and not worrying about processing high-res files until an order is placed.

Sell Media (and this theme) supports a variety of file formats (anything you can upload into WordPress), but since some file formats aren’t “web friendly” – meaning that they can’t be displayed on a website – you simply need to set a Featured Image for each post in JPG or PNG format.

Hello Thad,
I’m new in web designing and I’m learning a bit about this. By now, I have two issues that are driving me crazy:
1. The background image on the homepage is too big, but in secondary pages looks great. (Same image, but in the home is disproportionate) and,
2. “Advanced Search” pluggin looks great on my homepage but in secondary pages is fully offset to the top. (I’ve been editing the “style.css” sheet, but when I correct in secondary page altered the homepage)

Please, I need your help or guide in these points for further progress with my website http://www.winkest.com I really hope you can help me with my website problems.

After setting things up for while i’m suddenly getting a fatal error: ” Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_term_meta() in /nfs/home/deb18787n3/domains/betabeeld.nl/public_html/wp-content/themes/stock-photography/taxonomy-collection.php on line 12″
I’m not sure where to go from here, without stratimg from scrath again. The settings seem the same as the original theme setting,
Any idea’s.
Thanks,
Arno

Sounds like you might have installed it incorrectly or are using an outdated version of WordPress. Upgrade to the most recent version and reinstall the theme using the WP Theme Uploader. If that fails, please contact our support team and they’ll help you out: http://graphpaperpress.com/contact/

This is happening to me too. The temporary solution is to move down to version 1.0.3. I just tried to upgrade to 1.0.6 after they suggested it to me but the problem started happening again. Their tech support will take a while to get to your request.

Users can purchase multiple images at once. If you want to sell image “batches” you can simply upload the images all ZIPPED up and sell them as one product. There is not ability to sell an entire collection thought – users have to buy images by adding each to their cart.

My Watermark feature insists on appearing over my header image – even when I uncheck Watermark in the settings and upload a new image. This was rectified in a past update. But the problem has resurfaced. Any ideas?

Due to the trial and error nature of the home page header image’s crop, I have uploaded the image many times – always through the Appearance>Header interface. I upload a new photo and do not use the media library. I have posted this in the forums if you don’t want to trouble-shoot it here.

We have just launched our stock photography site using this theme and the Sell Media plugin. Check out adstockphoto.se. Royalty free images – quick, easy, problem free.
Thank you GPP for all your hard work!

Hi ya – anyone got any examples of sites built with this Theme where the search function is working properly?
I’ve found about 6 sites and the search does not work properly. I.e. the results are never consistent with the search term used. E.g. this guy’s site – type in banana and you get every other fruit and vegetable also. This is the same for every site i’ve looked at.

Please share any sites you might have that are working correctly. Looks like a great Theme and if I can see the search working – will sign up straight away! Cheers, AC.

2) Yes, there is only one purchase which comes with free support and updates for one year. If you are planning to keep up the website for more than one year, it makes more sense to invest in a subscription.

Hi! As you can see at http://www.fotos.anibaltrejo.com/gallery-list I have tens of galleries with hundreds of images each… is there any limits on the amounts of galleries and their capacity? Thanks in advance for your reply! A.

I can see that people can buy one or more images…but does this theme come with the functionality to allow people to buy a licence e.g. for x amount per month they can download say 25 images….or offer people a yearly licence…as per what Shutterstock offers?

First of all sorry for my poor english – which leads directly to my first question:
are your themes localizeable, this means, can i change the theme and any keywords/values to another language? For examle, US-adresses need a ZIP code and a state – for german adresses i do not need a state but instead of ZIP i need a so called “PLZ”. This maybe a simple question but for me it applies to all fields in the theme. Furthermore – are the sell media plugin as well as the other plugins localizeable? By the way – is there any kind of “test drive” to check the above functionality?
Thanks in advance for your answers and kind regards from munich, germany
Andreas

Sorry for the slow reply! Yes, you can sell Stock Video Footage. I know of a few folks who are doing just that with this theme. All you have to do is:

1. Upload the video file you want to sell
2. Set a featured image for the item
3. Embed a short “teaser” clip (post it to YouTube or Vimeo) in the content.

This way, your homepage and archive pages have an image to represent the video you’re selling, potential customers can “preview” what they’re buying and they receive the original video file after purchasing.

I’d like to use this as an internal photo management system. I want all the functionality of a stock image engine but I don’t need the payment option. Is it possible to use this theme without the payment option?

key question we have: is it possible to have multiple users for uploading images (such as multiple photographers). Each with their own login and profile. The download prices will be the same for all the pictures, which are centrally organized. E.g. every download costs €1,- of which 20% will be payed to the photographer. Hoop to hear from you today, because we want to start with a test pilot in due course.

I’d like to know whether it’s possible (if so how) to display the thumbnails of a collection in their original ratio?
I’m asking since for many stockphoto visitors the ratio is very import (for example when looking for a magazine cover or an ad of a certain dimension) – clicking into each photo would make them leave the site rather quickly..
Currently the portrait orientated images become squares, where landscape orientated images are displayed in their original ratio.

Found that out myself. Unless anybody has a better idea, this looks like the way to do it:
Edit the template file taxonomy-collection.php (I ‘childthemed’ it), and change for example around line 165:
(I broke up the tags so they’re not stripped in this example)

A very awesome ! blog post. We are really grateful for your blog post. You will find a lot of approaches after visiting your post. I was exactly searching for. Thanks for such post and please keep it up.

How secure it this?
Can one just go through the “back door” and download the high res? What about watermarking is that available? Lastly, when processing the payment, what payment options are there and is the purchase of a separate SSL cert necessary? Thanks much!

Sell Media supports PayPal out of the box and there is an optional Stripe extension (highly recommend!) if you want to process credit cards directly on your site. SSL is recommended if you add the Stripe extension:

Is it possible to require users to signup before being able to view any of the images or collections? (Like the sunshine photo cart does) We don’t want to introduce a blanket password for everyone and would prefer everyone to have to register and even us approve the registration before they are able to view the photos and purchase.

If you want you can use a plugin to lock your site so users have to gain your approval first, then you can protect collections using the Password Protect feature. Users then have to be given the password and link to these ‘hidden collections’.

Thanks Sam. Do the user accounts setup by buying a photo get setup as ordinary WordPress users? If so I could probably hide the account signup form when purchasing a photo and only let existing users (which I manually setup from the admin panel) sign in and buy photos.

We are having issues with paypal en user accounts. When visitor visits the site, they can buy photo, also checout is working. Payments get processed also, but: Users are not being forced to create an account and no mails are being send with download link , also under account (when we make 1 ourself) there are no downloadlinks, nothing showing up. What do we miss here?!

Customer accounts account information is derived from the payment processor (PayPal or Stripe). This way, the checkout page is fast and there isn’t any need to enter redundant data (we can get it all from payment gateway).

Loving the look of your theme. Little question, I am new to all this and I am wondering how do I store all of my images (large files) for a stock photography website. Should we have a cloud? Any tips are welcome. Also, is your theme a good option for professional stock photography websites that have millions of images and users? Thank you in advance,
Isabella.

You can invite other photographers to your blog simply by adding them as a contributor (Users -> Add New -> Set role to contributor. Then, they can upload items into Sell Media. Keywords are automatically extracted from the image’s IPTC metadata. Not need to add it twice 🙂

Great looking theme! I have an pre-sale question: most of my clients download a lot of images and it’s very inconvienent for them to pay on-the-spot for each image they want to download. Can I give clients permission to download any image the they want to use, without charging them for each picture? We want to work on a download-first, get-an-invoice-later basis.

Hello
I have a small problem with the extension Magnifier, it doesn’t work properly ONLY when the extension Watermark is active. I don’t know how to solve this problem, and i’d like to ask you for help, please. I use Sell Media with all extensions and theme Stock Photography, everything else is working perfectly so far. Thanks
You can see what exactly is the problem on the photo.

I have problems with searching, I can´t find the way to fix it, maybe somebody can help me.

Problem: I have image with keyword “nature” and it´s in collection called “nature”, why searching machine can´t find my image?

It says first: “Oops! That page can’t be found. It looks like nothing was found at this location. Maybe try one of the links below or a search?” and after I try to search again it says: “Nothing Found. Sorry, but nothing matched your search terms. Please try again with some different keywords.”

This keywords-system is one of the reason why I bought this theme, so I would be really happy, if I could solve this problem.

Any keywords that you add to your images in your image editing application before uploading into WordPress get extracted and automatically generate keywords in Sell Media. A collection isn’t a keyword. It’s a way of grouping items together in a hierarchical manner. So, just add your keywords (you can use the batch edit too) to apply any keywords that are missing from your images after you have uploaded them.

I’ve been having GD Library problems, seems like since upgrading WordPress a couple weeks ago. Since before then, things worked correctly.

Problem: If I upload a hi-res photo, Sell Media does not create smaller-res copies. It displays the hi-res file (bad!!) on my product page. However, if I upload a smaller photo, I get a message like this: “This image (705 x 470) is smaller than the available size(s), so these sizes won’t be available for sale.
Large (18×12 in) (5400 x 3600)
Medium (12×8 in) (3600 x 2400)
Small (6×4 in) (1800 x 1200)”

Hi!
It looks I´m in trouble with this theme – after updating Sell Media plugin I got bad changes – Lightbox is not working, mobile-size design is broken, thumbnails went very small. Is it better to not to update plugins?
I´m really unhappy with this beautiful theme. : )

It is a shame after paying for this theme and the print plugin, sell media and lock 100s of pictures into the eco-system, that the wordpress bullets stop working across my site. I cannot find any support to help fix this on my login, does anyone know why this has happened and how to fix it? Sad but time to move away from GPP – now to find migration routes…

Sorry, I’m not sure I understand the issue. You mention “WordPress bullets”…is this a typo? I’m sure we can help you figure our your issue. Just contact our support team: https://graphpaperpress.com/contact/

Odd. Happy to fix any CSS issues you find, simply report it to our support team. I did see a note about sidebars not working as expected. I think there might be some confusion here: You have Single Column selected in Sell Media options but also have a Sidebar enabled. This will cause your sidebar to show in the right of the post, and the sell media buy info below the post. If you want the Sell Media buying info to show to the right, disable the sidebar and enable Two Columns on the Sell Media settings. If that’s not what you’re referring to, just let us know and we’ll get you fixed up.

Hi there – after paying for the 1.2.7 update the issues remain:
1 No bullets are showing across site
2 I was expecting to be able to see proper aspect ratio thumbnails vs square – people cannot make decisions on an image if it is a sq crop – where is this option?
3 The next/previous image arrows are buried at bottom of the page – people have to scroll down each time, click next, then scroll to bottom, where is the option to put these at top of collection/single views?
4 Expand on hover plugin not working
– also what is the best way to delete ALL images/thumbs/sellmedia pages so no images are left on server, think I am going to move to a completely new setup and so annoying to have to start from scratch with this…Cheers

As you can see, it’s very active. The Sell Media plugin handles all of the selling/transaction-related stuff. It’s open source, so you can checkout all of the commits/history for it: https://github.com/graphpaperpress/Sell-Media

Tracking purchases by photographer can only be done using the “Commission” extension:

Hi there – since the recent Sell Media plugin update the pages that display collections or search results are formatted wrong on this theme, either thumbnails are missing, font is too big and thumbs tiny and spread out – basically it has rendered it unusable?! Anyone else with these issues?

I have just installed the theme and have an error where both the lightbox page and the single media pages show up blank (all the other pages seem fine). I have followed the instructions for adding the shortcode to the lightbox page and selecting the Lightbox template type. Have a missed another integral part of setting up these two page types?

Does anyone know if I have to pay for this theme once or every year? I’m asking this because the Organic Theme will charge you every year 69 USD. I was not amused when I found out. Hope this theme is different.

Yes. All you have to do to sell video is embed a video preview (YouTube/Vimeo) in the content editor for the item you’re selling. Then, just upload and sell the video just like you would any other kind of media. If you’re selling large video files, you might look into using the Amazon S3 extension:

2. I’m not sure I understand. When you upload images to Sell Media on the Sell Media -> Add New page, those images also go into your Media Library. Every image upload in WordPress does into the Media Library.

3. Yes, but you’d need to add an is_home() check inside the wp_enqueue_script() function in the Lightbox plugin. Contact us if you need more help with this. [email protected]